[Fsf-friends] Fwd: success--in viewing maharashtra's electoralrolls in the open source firef

Ajay Pal Singh Atwal ajaypal@bbsbec.org
Tue Sep 13 22:21:59 IST 2005


This has more to do with lack of awareness than the govt itself supporting
M$ or other proprietary technology. And such decisions are usually made at
local levels by local govt ICT managers/ babus. If somehow there are
efforts to educate people especially govt employees about freedom software
and open standards, we would not face such problems.

Usually the attitute in govt office is to somehow get the work done/
finished/ get_it_over/ i_dont_know_nothing_just_get_it_finished_somehow
and if it seems to be working, even if imperfectly/ partially, they would
say its done.
Usually ppl in govt office know little/ limited about technologies and
standards and would find the only solution they know of. Unfortunately
mostof the times they only know M$ and friends as they have been taught
during their shortest possible skill upgrade courses/ college skill/ word
of mouth things. And if they do outsource they usually  get similar
vendors. This is a viscious circle and can only be broken by the very well
know answer, education and marketing of Freedom software.

IMHO: They are not with M$ but are only (usually innocently) ignorant of
the choice and freedom thats just out here.

Oh lest i forget you can find govt employees in CDAC/C-DOT too.


> --- In eGovINDIA@yahoogroups.com, Kush <kushkaran@f...> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I am trying to see the results for the electoral rolls from
> http://203.199.16.205/msd/ or any other district except "Mumbai city"
>
> in the open source web browser known as firefox. Unfortunately there
> is a need to install a font called DVBW-TTSurekh available from
> http://www.maharashtra.gov.in/fonts/fontsHelp.php
>
> specifically http://www.maharashtra.gov.in/fonts/bin/Dvbwsr0n.ttf
> (For windows machines-- this has to be copied into the windows\fonts
> directory whereas for linux its to be copied into the user's home
> directory's .fonts directory ie ~/.fonts)
>
> and the following lines at the beginning of the source page of the
> result need to be added (which only a person with a little knowledge
> of html and a text editor would be knowing)
>
> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
>
>
> Then only the results are seen properly.
>
> THERE IS NO NEED FOR A CDAC PLUGIN AT ALL--something which has been
> made mandatory for all visitors so that they only use microsoft's
> Internet explorer. The results were deliberately not working except
> for "mumbai city" which is the elite section of maharashtra because
> the results page had a missing meta tag as above. Only search
> results generated from mumbai city were working because this meta
> tag was generated correctly for them. this affected search results
> for all districts other than "Mumbai city" including Mumbai Suburban
> and Pune.
>
> Once the tag is properly generated in each resulting page, any browser
> (netscape, opera, mozilla etc) can view the results. This is another
> way that a premier GOVT agency like CDAC helps propagate Microsoft
> and its products in preference to what is good for the country by
> forcing the layman to use microsoft products and showing that there
> is no other way to get IT work done.
>
> Regards,
> Kussh
> --- End forwarded message ---
>
>
>
>
>
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Ajay Pal Singh Atwal
Lecturer
Dept. CSE & IT
----------------------
http://www.ajaypal.com
----------------------



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